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Unread 07-23-2001, 10:22 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
Lariat Emeritus
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
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TM: Does any living poet employ vernacular speech as
cunningly as you do?

RSG: Naw.

TM: Has anyone done so since Shakespeare or Chaucer?

RSG: Burns and Swinburne.

TM: How would you describe your personal relationship
with all four of those poets?

RSG: Very close. I channel them nightly on A&E.

TM: Given your blinding speed and heroic physique, you
could have made a fortune playing ball. What on earth
prompted you to pursue so unremunerative a career as
poet?

RSG: I was reared in the bayou, croaking Cajun to my
only friends, the frogs. I thought mastering the
English language was a loftier goal than fame or fortune. I was dead
wrong.

TM: With the possible exception of Tim Steele, you are
the strictest formalist of my generation, yet in your
famous cento you rhyme:
“bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,”
and “an aged man is but a paltry thing.”
Do those lines really rhyme in southeast Texas?

RSG: Whup you upside they head, ma cher.


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